The Album!!

As promised, here are the 25 (!!) pages from the last 3 months.  Enjoy!  They're compressed for going online, so if you want to see them in their full glory, you are cordially invited to come over for tea and a visit. :)

Three Months Old!

Nolan is 3 months today - what an awesome little boy we've got.  Love every minute with him.

He's learned something new this week - yesterday he grabbed his soother when I held it up in front of him, and then grabbed his teething ring.  This morning I tried holding a few different things in front of him and he grabbed them all.  He's been grabbing his blankets and stuffing them into his mouth, and he also has been pushing his soother back in when it slips out but is still close, but this moves him officially into the next stage.  So big.

On Monday we went and got Nolan's first shots.  He was in good spirits when we got there, and didn't cry too much with the first one, but the second one was the painful one, and he had some good screams for a few minutes.  Poor little guy.  Thankfully that was the only reaction to it... he was fine and happy again pretty quick after, and he didn't have any side effects.

I finished the last of the album pages this morning, so watch for that post tomorrow!

2012 - The Album.

Happy Tuesday, Friends!

If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be?  I would probably be in Winnipeg, watching my nephew Silas in Seussical the Musical.  Since I'm not there, here with my family is a good second.  It was a pretty plain night, actually - once Nolan fell asleep, Sean and I went out to pick up a new toaster and a curtain rod for N's new drapes.  They're very boyish - dark blue with cars on them.  Now that it's lighter longer, we needed to get something to darken the room, and we needed something to finish off the window anyway.

I picked up pictures today & filled in my pages for the last 5 weeks.  Now I just have to put the finishing touches on them - that will take a day or two, then I promise I will post them all.  My goal this week is to share them with you!  I am enjoying doing our year like this - I've got a weekly routine now for uploading and saving my photos, and when I can get to it, planning each week's page or pages, setting up the smaller ones on Photoshop, and ordering them.  Here are the two pages for Christmas and the first two for January - up to just before Nolan made his appearance.

40 Books Every Child Should Read

Follow this link to the Half Price Book Blog's list of favorites; they've got it listed by book covers & seeing them will bring back memories for all you readers out there, I'm sure. 

I'm going to try to read them all this year.  How's that for a fun goal?!

What were your favorite childhood books?  Share, please; I'd love to add them to my list!

Swimming!!

This post is coming to you live from over the border, and I've got a fun 'first' to share with you. First, a couple of shots from the weekend.

 

We did not have a lot of snow this winter, and it's been an early spring, so what snow we did have has been gone for a while.  This is what we woke up to Saturday morning.  There always has to be one last snow...

This is from Easter Sunday.  Highlights were that Nolan got to meet another aunt and uncle and two cousins, and we found out that there's another cousin on the way!!  K & J are due in November - it was good timing that I took along the bag of maternity clothes she had loaned me!

M and N having fun with the mirror in our hotel room today.  We came down into North Dakota on Monday, along with half of Regina according to the border crossing guard.  The kids do have the week off school... I've never done the Minot shopping thing before, and we came this time because Sean needed to pick up some car parts - they didn't ship to Canada, so he had them sent to a parcel pickup service here.  We decided to made a little trip of it and get in some family time since he had to come anyway.  We went as far as Minot yesterday and walked the mall to check out what they had that was different than home.  This morning we checked out the Hobby Lobby and then hit the road for Grand Forks.  Sean will get his goods tomorrow morning, then we'll explore here for the day, and head back to Minot for another night, then head home Thursday.  A short drive each day is not too bad with the little guy, as he does sleep most of the drive time.  He is being very accommodating about not getting too fussy, since we are either all together in small spaces, like the car and the hotel room, or in public, like shops and restaurants...  He does have his moments, of course, but it could be way worse!

So the big first - since were are staying in hotels, with pools, we thought we'd pack his swim stuff and see if it worked out to get him wet:

 

In the swim pants and cute bathing suit...  It's size 6-9 months, and fits him great!  (Yep, he's not even 3 months yet.)  They have a good kiddie pool here that was a decent temperature, and he did great.  It was just like a big bath, except he didn't get quite as splashy.  Enough to get it in his face, though!

Of course M liked the kiddie pool too.  I took N back for a bath and bedtime and the other two got in more swimming and hot tubbing.  Our little road trip is turning into not a bad little vacation.

He Is Risen!

He is risen, indeed.  Happy Easter!

(from Simple Mom via Pinterest)

A few shots from our week.

Father & Son - looking pretty dapper! Notice the hair coming in?

Look what Sean found in the back of the shed!

Sister & Brother

Love how he was interacting with this!

Hooray for open pink spaces!

I`ll leave you with... the pooping face.

Latest Obsession

My favorite thing to do online lately is find free journaling cards for my scrapbook.  I'm using the divided page protectors (photos to come sometime soon!) and have seen lots of project life freebies out there, so I've been collecting...  Some are png, so I can open them in Photoshop and add my journaling there, and some are pdf, and I'm just printing them off.  I'm pretty sure I'll use both kinds, but probably the printed ones more often - I'm a grab-the-paper-and-write kind of girl.  Since I am using Photoshop on a regular basis now to make my smaller sized photos (two 3x4's or 4 2x3's saved as a 4x6 is only 19 cents, and can be ordered online from home, as opposed to the 32 cents to do the smaller sizes manually there on the machines. Win-win!), I can open up the files and print them off along with my photos.

Here are some of the files I've saved, along with where I found them, in case you're interested!  They would be great for all kinds of things, too, not just scrapbooking.

This is from This Kalil Life - she's making a free printable each week this year.

 These are part of the 60 free journaling cards from Miss Tiina.

 

These great ones were found on My Sister's Suitcase.

Let's Talk cards from Scrap Tales.

I just printed off six pages from Creativity Prompt - there are lots there to choose from.

Enjoy!

Observant.

Thursday, March 29.  Nolan turned 10 weeks old.  I finally noticed that his diapers have two different designs on them.

Sunday, April 1.  April Fool's Day.  Madeline gets one cup of coffee a week, and today was the day.  Her plan was to use her new travel mug and take coffee to church.  Dad said no to the syrups, so she had to use sugar...  She's 12 years old and very generous with the sweets; she used two spoonfuls.

Last night we replaced the sugar with salt.

We got her good.